A centralized in-flight alerts system, FWS (for Flight Warning System), constitutes an advance with respect to sub-system based alerts reports which did not allow the crew to have an overall view should several alerts arise concomitantly. On the other hand, the development and maintenance of such systems are complex and expensive since they depend not only on the technical specifications of aircraft equipment but still more on the operational procedures defined by aircraft manufacturers and specialized by operators. It is therefore important to be able to easily modify the configuration of an alerts and procedures management system on the one hand, for one and the same model of aircraft, as a function of the order of the airline that operates it, or for one and the same airline over time in tandem with changes in regulations and feedback from experience, and on the other hand, for several models of aircrafts, when these latter exhibit a considerable common share in the components, the sub-systems or else the operational needs of the operator. These conditions are not fulfilled by the alerts and procedures management systems of the prior art which exhibit the characteristic of being developed, having regard to the certification constraints, as a monolithic sequential code. Lengthy design and validations, carried out at the end of an aircraft's development cycle, are necessary in order to integrate the developments of the aircraft's other sub-systems into the alert system; regular software updates must be organized during development and in a subsequent phase of commercial operation of the aircraft.
To solve this problem, the general idea of the invention is to structure the alerts and procedures management system by isolating on the one hand a generic software kernel which constitutes an invariant part and which is certified, and on the other hand a configurable variable part so as to make it possible to adapt the alert system to changes in the operational needs of the aircraft, during development or during operation.
An alerts management system, of which a module for scheduling tasks is modifiable by means of a configuration table, is also known from the patent application filed by the applicant under publication No. FR2935818. The document thus proposes to factorize a part of the software code of the alerts management system, by rendering parameterizable a module for scheduling tasks. Nevertheless, a significant part of the alerts management system remains to be developed in the form of a monolithic sequential code; the proposed architecture does not make it possible to dispense with software development time and certification time.